This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Incantations are studied across several distinct scholarly disciplines at once: classical philology recovering and translating the Greek and Roman curse tablets and magical papyri, Assyriology reconstructing the Mesopotamian incantation series from cuneiform tablets, and folklore and ethnography documenting living charm and conjure traditions through fieldwork rather than manuscript recovery. A comparative reference work such as the Encyclopedia of Religion is where these separate disciplinary histories are brought into a single frame for comparison.
That comparative frame is useful precisely because it resists collapsing the different traditions into one another: an ancient Mesopotamian incantation against witchcraft, a medieval Christian charm invoking saints against illness, and a documented Pennsylvania Dutch Braucherei remedy are each read within their own cultural logic first, and only then compared for what, if anything, genuinely runs across them, most often the belief that a spoken or written formula, correctly performed, can act on the world.
An entry follows that same order, recording a tradition's own documented account of how and why its incantation works before any comparative claim is made, and keeps living and closed traditions described rather than instructed, consistent with how the atlas treats every closed practice.